Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal – (05-17-01)

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

This is actually a book review and do I really need to say any more?

(review) Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation may finally end America’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on the country’s cuisine. In his first book, Schlosser, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, looks at the machinery behind the making of french fries, burgers, and other favorites. The result is a fascinating, exhaustive polemic that calls on readers to connect some of the most vexing public health problems to the industrialization of food production and, ultimately, to North American cultural practices. Schlosser begins his deconstruction of fast food with an analysis of the history of such chains as McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr., looking at the assembly line principles that have made their success possible and their legacy of systematically marketing products to parents and children. He notes that fast food is so ingrained in our culture that working for a franchise has become a teenage rite of passage. Families converge on chains because of the clowns, cartoons, toys, and kids’ meals, the idea of convenience and wholesomeness prevailing despite fat-rich menus.What is hidden under the Playland image, however, and what this book attempts to make most apparent, is the labor and the human cost of the food machine. Adolescents may troop to after-school jobs at McDonalds, but Schlosser contends that they form part of an underpaid and exploited work force. In separate chapters, he looks at obesity and the prevalence of fast food in the nation’s schools, and he describes his visits to cattle ranches, potato farms, and laboratories where french fries are given that hearty beef tallow taste. He reports from the slaughterhouse, describing, for example, the work of the “sticker” who stands in a river of blood, “slitting a neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery.”The details, documented in extensive notes at the back of the book, expose how ridiculous and astonishing the demands of mass consumption can be, and how dangerous conditions are for both workers and patrons. Meatpacking plants, for instance, boast an injury rate almost 35 times higher than the national average in industry. Lacerations, missing fingers, broken bones, torn muscles, and slipped disks are common in this population of mainly immigrant workers, and injury rates increase as assembly lines are sped up to supply the consumer appetite for beef.Indeed, Fast Food Nation reveals a universe made fat and strange, with children attending schools supported by soft-drink advertisers and chickens bred for bigger breasts. Moreover, Schlosser points out how ineffectual our regulatory bodies are in the face of the potential problems:The manufacture of frozen cheese pizzas is regulated by the FDA, but if a pizza has pepperoni on it, the USDA has food safety jurisdiction. Eggs are regulated by the FDA, but chickens are regulated by the USDA, and a lack of cooperation between the two agencies has hampered efforts to reduce the levels of Salmonella in American eggs. (p 264)The back-and-forth of the regulatory bodies may seem comic and even Kafka-esque, but Schlosser points out that the joke is ultimately on the consumer.For example, examining feedlots in which cattle are raised, Schlosser notes that they have become “an extremely efficient mechanism for “recirculating the manure,” which is unfortunate, since E coli 0157:H7 can replicate in cattle troughs and survive in manure for up to ninety days.” Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “There is [expletive] in the meat.”In the age of mad cow disease and the obesity epidemic, this graphic critique should not be ignored. By exposing potential threats to public health that come as a result of our reluctance to examine the mechanisms that bring food to our tables, Fast Food Nation urges readers to question what consumers and medical professionals are willing to swallow, both literally and figuratively.